Posted on 11/20/2002 8:58:11 AM PST by MindBender26
(CBS) (NEW YORK) New York City officials will fly to the Bahamas on Wednesday for a "fact-finding mission" to determine whether retired cruise ships could be used to house the growing number of homeless people, a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services said.
"They will be looking at a couple of retired cruise ships," said the spokesman, Jim Anderson. "They will be questioning whether they would be safe and appropriate shelter space for homeless clients."
The officials, including Linda Gibbs, the city's commissioner of homeless services, are being flown to the Bahamas on the mayor's private jet. The trip is scheduled to last for a few hours.
Gibbs said the officials would be evaluating the cost-effectiveness of using cruise ships to accommodate homeless people, adding that all options must be explored.
"We can't reject any idea that's offered," Gibbs said on Tuesday night. "I think we have to be unafraid to think creatively and to explore options that maybe haven't been looked at in the past."
Homelessness in New York City is at an all-time high, with 36,000 people staying in shelters each night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The city is bound by law to provide free temporary shelter to those who say they have no place to live.
City officials are expected to conduct an annual census of homeless people this winter.
A fundamental rule of economics, or even society as a whole, is that you get less of the things you tax, and more of the things you subsidize.
San Francisco and NYC subsidize their bums.
Can you imagine the booze-induced brawls and the routine "man overboard!" alerts? Can you imagine the junkies fighting it out in the hallways, the vagrants urinating in the cabins?
Leave it to an idiot liberal to come up with an idea as absolutely brilliant as this.
It's been done before, most notably:
"One begins to be sick of 'death vomited in great floods.'
Nevertheless hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches through centuries), in the dead December and January nights, over Nantes Town,--confused noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of rage and lamentation; mingling with the everlasting moan of the Loire waters there?
Nantes Town is sunk in sleep; but Representant Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company of Marat is not sleeping.
Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft, that gabarre; about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under hatches? They are going to Belle Isle?
In the middle of the Loire stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with all her cargo.
'Sentence of Deportation,' writes Carrier, 'was executed vertically.'
The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin, lie deep!
It is the first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have become famous forever."
- The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle
He's DY-NO-MITE!
Compared to NY rent, (union) building costs and meeting codes ?
Of course, it was satire (Pohl and Kornbluth both being Communists) and the bright advertising man who came up with the idea gets put on the last "spaceship" and blown up.
It was pretty funny, and worth re-reading, though. The lengths the small minority of intelligent, productive people go to in order to keep the billions of "marching morons" from catching on to how stupid and worthless they really are reminds me a LOT of the Democratic Parties strategy...
LOL. I am laughing too hard to comment.
The mental hospitals shut down in the 80s because the ACLU fought for the rights of all the mentally ill to live in the streets. The institutions became hotels with no guests.
Still, mentally ill or stupid, it's better to be homeless where its warm.
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